Pages

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Translation Party - Can Translations be Fun?

Recently, I became a HUGE fan of CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast (nothing to do with the Google Buzz launch this week, and believe me, these CNET presenters are not happy with Google stealing their show's name). Whatever, today, when I was listening to one of their latest episodes, they suggested a site to visit - it's called the "Translation Party" (oh, btw, its from Google...). 

What it does is simple. It asks you to enter any English sentence. It converts that sentence to Japanese (I know what you might be thinking. Japanese, huh? Do I need to impress anyone in Japanese!?!). Simple, right? But here's where the fun starts (and that's why the name has "Party" in it). It converts the translated Japanese back to English. and so forth. After about ten or so to and fro translations, even in your wildest dreams, you won't be able to imagine how come the final English sentence turn out to be so funny (and equally senseless). 

Lets, for example, enter a sentence: "I am planning to visit the auto expo in Chicago today." Plain, simple English, which even a 3 year old kid is going to understand, right. On clicking the "find equilibrium" - yes, that's what they seem to call it, this is what it displays:


 

Once more!! Once more!! Lets enter "Man, I am so tired of the cold!!!" And, here comes the response:


Try it out for yourself, and comment if you find some translations real deep and profound!!

2 comments:

  1. Oh this is really funny dude!
    I tried a couple of statements and the final 'equilibrium' was not all that funny. Then I tried a longer sentence.. The equilibrium was marginally funny.. But what had me smiling was the message at the bottom - 'You should move to Japan' lol!!!
    Thanks for sharing.. Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Haha.. That's funny! I went through this Translation Party with my Japanese friend and sure enough, even the first translated entry in Japanese cracked her up.. Forget about the equilibrium, even the next few didn't make any sense to her.. We tried many funny and nasty (you don't really want to know ;)) sentences and the equilibrium just left us in splits... :P

    Here's something rather simple and harmless (!) that I tried.. :P

    "Abhishek, you must be highly jobless!"
    //Bachchan has a high unemployment rate!//

    Oh, really?! At that rate,

    "God save the translation party!"
    //God will be converted to a third party!//

    What?!?!?! :-o

    Thanks for sharing! You have no idea what a gala time I had at the party! :D

    ReplyDelete